I’m trying to put together a Glorantha game with my nostalgic Avalon Hill box sets. With that in mind, I’ve been charting out all kinds of ways I could house rule the game to give the players an incentive to get into the right cultural and mystical mindset.
I love the way HeroQuest Glorantha has a huge box on the character sheet titled RUNES. That, right there, tells the player that this stuff is important, that these abstract totems do affect their lives in a very concrete way.
It seems funny that RuneQuest, of all games, seems to have very little to have with these runes. Sure, they’re there in the world and the lore, but the players don’t have to think about them at all to play the game. Even the bits on Runic Magic don’t actually detail the runes themselves, just pantheons and sacrifices and POW.
Do the later editions have any mechanisms that involve the runes in any real way? Are there any great houserules out there that do so? Mongoose’s magic stones that drop from the sky and give you superpowers don’t do it for me, sadly.
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